Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

I left him standing in the open door with the bottle in his hand, his lined face covered with pinpoints of moisture.

On the four-lane highway west of town I opened up the Cadillac, lowered the windows, and passed long strings of late afternoon traffic, hitting the shoulders and showering gravel over the asphalt. The red sun burned across the tops of the hills and lighted the dark edges of the post oaks and blackjack, and the shadows of the cedar-post fences along the road broke silently against my fenders like a blinking eye. Although I had driven that same highway hundreds of times, the sunset gave a different cast and color to the land than anything I had seen there before. The windmills were motionless in the static air; the cattle in the fields were covered with scarlet, their heads stationary in the short grass, and the neat white ranch houses seemed as devoid of life and movement as an abandoned film set; the irrigation ditches were dry and cracked with drought, the thickets of mesquite like burned scratches against the hillsides, and the few horses in the pastures looked as though they had been misplaced.

The shadows deepened over the hills, the traffic thinned, and I kept the accelerator to the floor for the next fifty miles. The signboards, the oil rigs, and the three-dollar Okie motels sped past me in the twilight, but none of it would click together as a stable piece of geography that I had lived around all my life. It was removed, unconnected, and the whiskey from my flask made it even emptier and more disjointed. As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape.

It was night and just the horn of the moon shone above the hills when I reached Pueblo Verde. Lights glowed inside farmhouses beyond the dark fields and orchards of citrus trees, and the river was as black as gunmetal under the starless sky. Everything was closed on the main street except the hotel and beer tavern, and I turned down the rutted road into the Mexican district, wondering what type of inadequate words I would choose to tell Rie and her friends that Art’s death had come about the same way that a stupid fool steps on your foot aboard a crowded bus. I understood why Western Union offices always kept a pamphlet of prepared condolences on their counters. Death is the one occasion when words have as much relevance as a housewife talking across her back fence about a broken washing machine.

My flask was empty. I stopped in the Mexican tavern for a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and had two drinks from the bottle in the car before I pulled up in front of the union headquarters. Bugs flicked against the screen door and turned in the yellow square of light on the porch. One of the windows had a large, spiderwebbed hole in the center, and someone had taped a piece of cardboard over it from the inside. Okay, doc, let’s go, I thought.

I walked up the dirt path and knocked on the door. The Negro and two Mexicans in cowboy shirts and blue jeans were talking at a table piled with cardboard picket signs and bumper stickers. Only the Negro turned his head toward the door when I knocked; the other two kept talking, their faces calmly intense with whatever they were saying, their hands and fingers gesturing in the air with each sentence.

“Say, hello,” I said.

The Negro looked back at the door again, then pushed back his chair and walked toward me with a beer in his hand, his cannonball head shining in the light. He squinted at the screen with his red-rimmed eyes.

“That’s my whiskey brother out there, ain’t it?” he said. “Come on in, home. You ain’t got to knock around here.”

He pushed open the door for me and put out his large, callused block of a hand.

“Is Rie here?”

/> “She’s laying down. I’ll get her.”

“Maybe I should come back tomorrow.”

“No, she’ll want to see you. Get yourself a beer off the counter.”

“Look—”

“No, man. It’s all right.”

He went into the back of the building, and a few minutes later Rie walked out of the hall into the light. She was barefoot and wearing blue jeans and a flowered shirt, and her curly, sunburned hair was uncombed. I looked once at her face and realized that she already knew about Art’s death.

“How you doing, babe?”

“Hello, Hack.”

“I started to call first.”

The skin around her eyes was pale and there was no color in her mouth. I felt empty standing in front of her.

“Do you want to go for a drive?” I said.

Her eyes blinked a moment without really seeing any of us.

“There’s a meeting tonight,” she said.

“That’s them church people coming tonight,” the Negro said. “They don’t offer us nothing but prayers. You all go on.”

“I know a place to eat across the river,” I said. “Come on. I might run into a Carta Blanca sign by myself.”

I had peeled off the cellophane wrapper from a cigar and I couldn’t find an ashtray to put it in. It seemed that every word I spoke and every movement I made was somehow inappropriate.

“That’s right. Go on out of here,” the Negro said. “I’m going to run them church people off, anyway. Every time they come here they start sniffing at my wine breath.”

She pushed her hair back with her fingers and slipped on a pair of leather moccasins. She was too strong a girl to have cried much, but her face was wan and drawn and the suntan on it looked as though it didn’t belong there.

We walked out into the dark, down the path, and I put my arm around her shoulders. When I touched her and felt the trembling in her back I wanted to pull her into me and press her head against my chest.